Keith Ingels on Developing Your People and Making Lean / TPS Your Own

Episode page with transcript and more

My guest for Episode #484 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Keith Ingels, who previously joined us in Episode 390. He's the RLM Manager of Solutions & Support Centers — RLM being the Raymond Lean Management system.

He was also a guest with me for Episode 62 of “My Favorite Mistake.” His story and insights were also featured in Chapter 8 of my book, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation.

In today's episode, we discuss how the Raymond Corporation makes Lean / TPS their own management system, even while being under the Toyota corporate umbrella. RLM focuses on developing people and that starts with leaders. Why does a culture of continuous improvement start with small steps and not requiring ROI calculations for every improvement? We discuss how kaizen participation rates are a leading indicator of employee morale and how absenteeism and turnover are lagging indicators. We talk about that and more…

“Critique the process, not the people.”

Questions, Notes, and Highlights:

• Tell us about Raymond Corporation and its place within Toyota Industries
• The fit of products with Toyota branded forklifts?
• Back in 2020 your title was TPS Manager — has some of the language evolved?
• Minor differences? More English words, advising customers to do that and to own their own system
• TPS House – foundations
• Flow AND quality 
• Helping people unlearn??
• “It's about developing your people” —
• If you can see a problem, you can solve a problem
• “Critique the process, not the people”
• Assumptions vs. real knowledge
• “What are you hoping to achieve?” vs. “what problem are you trying to solve?”
• Coat hooks – not requiring ROI? – starting with small steps
• “You can't put a meter on morale”
• Utilizing fresh eyes and new employees for Kaizen
• “problem seeing eyes”
• Making it safe — problem speaking mouths?
• How to help people feel safe to speak up?
• Tell us about your “Microburst teaching” approach… 
• “You have to reinvent that safe environment every day” (psych safety)
• How do leaders cultivate the conditions for people to learn from mistakes? Same habits for building trust and kaizen? Anything different?

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